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arXiv · 1911.04070

BP-Transformer: Modelling Long-Range Context via Binary Partitioning

Zihao Ye·Qipeng Guo·Quan Gan·Xipeng Qiu·Zheng Zhang
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Abstract

The Transformer model is widely successful on many natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention limit its application on long text. In this paper, adopting a fine-to-coarse attention mechanism on multi-scale spans via binary partitioning (BP), we propose BP-Transformer (BPT for short). BPT yields $O(k\cdot n\log (n/k))$ connections where $k$ is a hyperparameter to control the density of attention. BPT has a good balance between computation complexity and model capacity. A series of experiments on text classification, machine translation and language modeling shows BPT has a superior performance for long text than previous self-attention models. Our code, hyperparameters and CUDA kernels for sparse attention are available in PyTorch.

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Zihao Ye, Qipeng Guo, Quan Gan, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang. 2019-11-11. BP-Transformer: Modelling Long-Range Context via Binary Partitioning. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.04070

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